College basketball's rules are hard and fast: If a ballhandler goes out of bounds, the play is dead. A three-pointer isn't a three-pointer if the shooter's foot is on the line.

Yet one rule is so routinely ignored, it has become meaningless: a coach stepping outside the coaching box.

Michigan State's Tom Izzo regularly roams the playing floor. In the final seconds of a loss to Oklahoma last season, Baylor's Scott Drew leapt onto the court, then fell backward as the Bears missed their last-gasp shot. In a game against Louisiana State this season, Kentucky's John Calipari—a prolific wanderer—lunged onto the court and shoved one of his players into position.

The rules require every coach to stay within a 28-foot roaming area behind the sideline and on his end of the court. Stepping outside the box can bring a warning followed by a technical foul.

But instead of incurring penalties, coaches are pulling off the sporting equivalent of eminent domain. Unchecked by referees, coaches are simply annexing new swaths of territory in which to work. If the NCAA tournament—which begins in earnest Thursday—is anything like this regular season has been, prepare to see millionaire coaches stomping wherever they please throughout March Madness.

"I think it's ridiculous that coaches are all over the floor," said Steve Kerr, a former NBA player who is now an NCAA tournament analyst. "They're coaching; they're not playing. They should be on the bench."

Not only does spring begin today, but so does the NCAA's annual basketball championship tournament. Mike Aresco, commissioner of the well-represented American Athletic Conference, talks brackets on MoneyBeat.

The situation is symbolic of the current state of college basketball. The game today is about the coaches. They are the most recognizable faces on the floor, especially now that the best players leave for the pros after one season.

Referees, meanwhile, are often contract workers with day jobs. They have enough problems—like deciding what's a charging foul under this season's revised rules—without challenging coaches over picayune matters.

But rules are rules. And at worst, college coaches have become potential obstacles to players and officials, said John Adams, the NCAA's national men's basketball officiating coordinator.

"We're going to run into a coach someday and someone is going to get hurt," Adams said. "And some lawyer is going to make a lot of money. Injury is the worst-case scenario. I think that gets lost in the cloud of 'Gee, it's not a big deal.'"

The NCAA doesn't track technical fouls for coaching-box violations, but technical fouls on Division I head coaches for unsportsmanlike behavior declined between January 2013 and January 2014, from 92 to 85.

When it comes to the coaching box, though, that is precisely the problem: The violation simply isn't being called.

Last season's NCAA rule book captured the issue: "Some coaches blatantly disregard the coaching box and many officials refuse to enforce the rule." That language was toned down for the current rule book, but coaching-box enforcement has been an NCAA point of emphasis for several years—to little avail.

"I think for the coaching profession, for the game itself, it looks messy, and it also looks like there are some people seeking an advantage," said Saint Joseph's coach Phil Martelli, president of the National Association of Basketball Coaches. "My thing is: It's a rule. Enforce the rule."

Adams said that of the 60 games he attended this season, and 100 more he watched on television, he had seen exactly one coaching-box warning. An instance of a referee actually calling a technical foul for the violation is even less common.

"It's really rare when you see it get called," said Grant Gibbs, a senior guard at Creighton. "It's almost like, 'What does he have against him?' because everybody's doing it."

Tim Higgins, a retired referee who worked 10 NCAA Final Fours, said most coaches who are out of the box don't mean any harm and are merely absorbed in coaching the game.

"Very candidly, if they're not bothering me, I don't want to bother them unless I have to," Higgins said. Calling a coaching-box technical foul, he said, is "like putting the death penalty on going through a red light."

The proliferation of camera phones and digital video has made it easier to highlight rule-breakers. A freeze-frame posted on a message board shows Indiana's coach with both feet on the court during a game against Penn State, his arms outstretched, with the caption "Tom 'the extra defender' Crean."

Yet some longtime officials and former players say coaches aren't violating the coaching box any more than in years past.

"Back in the old days, we used to run by one another," said Bill Raftery, a CBS analyst and coach at Seton Hall in the 1970s. Raftery even said he kept a bet with former Fairleigh Dickinson coach Al LoBalbo: "Whoever went by the other more," Raftery said, "owed him a couple of bucks."

A recent letter to the editor in the Lexington (Ky.) Herald-Leader—the hometown paper of Calipari's Kentucky Wildcats—decried his on-court roaming, saying it is "unsportsmanlike conduct and it screams of entitlement." A Kentucky spokesman said Calipari was unavailable for comment.

Higgins, the retired referee, said it was possible that some officials found famous coaches intimidating, but that such referees wouldn't last long in the business. One hindrance to enacting officiating reforms, Higgins said, is that college referees work games for various conferences, with differing playing styles and values. By comparison, NBA referees work for the league.

Former Dallas Mavericks guard Jason Kidd, now coach of the Brooklyn Nets, took action against a straying coach in 2010. In a game against Atlanta, Kidd spied Hawks coach Mike Woodson standing on the court, directing players on defense. Kidd dribbled right into Woodson, prompting an automatic technical foul on Atlanta and a key free throw for Dallas.

Kerr said he would like to see a college player do the same thing to an intrusive coach. "That," he said, "will put an end to all of it."

I just assumed that the coaches had bad vision and thus needed to be two feet closer to see what was going on. Seriously, can a coach see that much more be stepping on the court? I agree, run a couple of plays that run into a coach and they'll learn rather quickly to stay off the court.

Bo Ryan of Wisconsin is one of the worst offenders. He uses this tactic to try and intimidate the refs into making calls against the opposing team. He is notorious for this and bullied his way to getting refs to call a disproportionate number of foul calls on opposing teams at his home court in Madison. Unfortunately for Bo Ryan his students have the worst graduation rate as a team in the country: 40%. If Bo focused more on academics and caring about his student athletes he might actually have a respectable program and graduation rates. At his advanced age I think he might have already passed on ever caring about what these kids do after college....or if they ever get a college degree.....

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